American English has many casual phrases for making first contact.
Reach out. Contact someone, often for the first time.
Feel free to reach out. You are welcome to contact me.
I hope this email finds you well. A common polite first line of an email, often to someone you do not know well.
Ping me. Send me a short message.
Hop on a call. Talk by phone or video for a few minutes.
Shoot me an email. Write to me, quickly and informally.
Happy to connect. I accept your contact or introduction.
In 1970, Richard Bolles self-published What Color Is Your Parachute? The job-hunting guide went on to “sell more than 10 million copies over four decades.”
Bolles put little hope in job postings. He urged them to “form personal connections through means such as the informational interview.” In an informational interview, a job seeker asks a stranger for a short conversation about the stranger’s work.
At Disney’s theme parks, name tags “only list a cast member’s first name and their hometown.” Disney’s careers website calls the company a “first-name organization.”
Jack Spence trained new hires at Disneyland. He began each class by “telling my pupils that everyone in the company goes by their first name.” He also worked at Club 33, where he often met company executives. “I was expected to call them by their first name.” According to Spence, Walt Disney had a reason: “He wanted a casual informality at Disneyland.”
In 2012, Starbucks baristas began wearing name tags on their green aprons. They also “started asking customers for THEIR names and writing them on cups.” The company’s history page calls this “On a First-Name Basis.” It says: “Barista and customer were once again on a first-name basis.”
During the COVID-19 surge of 2020, the company stopped handwriting on cups. In October 2024, CEO Brian Niccol promised to bring back handwritten notes on cups: “We’re tracking down the Sharpies.”
Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago and Juliana Schroeder asked commuter train and bus riders to do one of three things. Some were to talk to a stranger. Some were to sit alone. The rest were to do what they normally did. The riders who talked to a stranger “reported having the most positive experience.”
When asked to predict, people “predicted precisely the opposite pattern of experiences.” They “underestimated others’ interest in connecting.” The university announced the study in July 2014 under the headline “Mom was wrong: You should talk to strangers.”
On December 2, 1803, Thomas Jefferson hosted the newly arrived British minister, Anthony Merry, and his wife, Elizabeth, at dinner. Jefferson did not escort Mrs. Merry to the table. He “instead escorted Dolley Madison, whom he seated at his side.” Merry had to find his own place at the table. He felt insulted.
The custom was called “pell-mell,” a “disorderly mingling of guests without any attention to rank or title.” Jefferson wrote it down as a rule: “When brought together in society all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.” At public ceremonies, the families of foreign ministers were to take their places “as they arrive, & without any precedence.”
In May 1967, the psychologist Stanley Milgram described a study in Psychology Today. He sent letters to people in Omaha, Nebraska, and Wichita, Kansas. Each letter had to reach a stranger in the Boston area. A sender could pass it only to someone they knew personally. That person would pass it on in the same way.
In a 1969 follow-up, Jeffrey Travers and Milgram started letters with 296 people in Nebraska and Boston. Knowing someone personally meant knowing them “on a first name basis.” Sixty-four letters reached the target. On average, each passed through 5.2 people on the way.
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, asked his store associates to make a promise. Trade press gives it this way: “whenever you come within 10 feet of a customer, you will look him in the eye, greet him and ask him if you can help him.”
James Earl Carter took the presidential oath as “Jimmy,” not “James.” In December 1977, Hugh Sidey of Time called him “the first President in history to get away with official use of a nickname.” National Park Service historians checked with the White House about which name to use. “Back came the order: Jimmy.”
Carter had campaigned the same way. In Iowa in 1975, before the 1976 caucuses, he would walk up to strangers. The journalist Judy Woodruff recalled that he would “put out his hand and say, hi, I’m Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer from Georgia, former Governor and I’m running for president.”
Sidey also saw a cost. He wrote that Carter’s “seemingly casual, unorthodox approach to the presidency may now be working against him.”
In January 1983, Yasuhiro Nakasone, the new prime minister of Japan, visited Ronald Reagan in Washington. For part of their talks, the two men “conferred together alone and in English.” According to Nakasone, “He said “call me Ron” and I replied “call me Yasu”.” Their next meeting, he said, would start with “Hi Ron” and “Hi Yasu.”
The friendship became known as the “Ron and Yasu” relationship. The first-name exchange did not settle the hard questions between the two countries, however. The Spectator noted that it “did not, however, produce any breakthroughs in the issues so long in dispute.”